Monthly Archives: January 2015

Perfection is Only a Guide.

In my senior year of high school, I was voted Perfectionist. I was sort of proud of being one, as annoying as it was for everyone around me. I fondly remember that every year all my textbooks were wrapped in the same way with brown paper grocery bags, marked and labeled in a consistent, branding-like format, which also applied to my matching binders. I had a vision for how certain things should be, and I did everything I can, even at the expense of my time and energy and my friends’ patience to achieve it.

Since then, through countless trials and errors in life, and partial successes and failures, I’ve come to realize that perfection is rarely needed in most tasks in life, and it usually has a low return on investment, offsetting any happiness I’d gain because of how much more work it needs. Therefore, I’ve accepted many realities of life and have become more laid back about a lot of things, especially when they are out of my control. It also took away some of the stress I had been carrying constantly.

The drive is still there; my vision is still there. This is undoubtedly true at work, where my eye for visual and experiential detail as a UI and UX designer is sharper than ever. And because I work in very fast-paced situations, I have also learned to better discern which less-than-perfect detail should be fixed and which are “shippable” due to time and/or resources. It’s a compromise, but it still reaches the highest possible level of quality based on the given circumstances, and that’s how I approach what I do these days. Perfection is a fantasy, but “really really really good” is still achievable. As long as I shoot for the moon, I will still be among the stars, as they say.

So for things that I can control, I still want the best that I can get. I still have visions to make my home look like they do in home decor magazines and catalogs. I still have a vision of being in the best physical health that I can possibly get. I still have a vision of being the best human being that I can be to my world and to the world. I want to live my best life.

I Do What I Need to Sleep at Night

The Origin

A few years ago, I attended a Financial Planning Day event to learn how to manage my money. Despite hearing advice for many years to start saving for retirement early, I had been putting it off because it all felt very complicated. But as I headed deep into the second half of my twenties, I knew I knew I had to start getting my finances in order.

One of the financial planning concepts repeated many times at the event was to invest retirement fund in a combination of stocks and bonds, and that young people should be more aggressive and invest more in stocks than bonds, because stocks can grow more than bonds, though they are more risky. Being young risk-averse, how aggressive and at what percentage of stocks should I invest? The answer, also repeated many times at the event, was, “Whatever you need to sleep at night.”

That advice unleashed the power and motivation for me to actively take charge of my finances. Eventually, it spread to the other areas of my life, because after all, from a day-to-day perspective, that’s what really matters: What will it take to give me a peace of mind every day, to reach the lowest level of continuous stress and worries, allowing me to spend my time being happy and enjoying things that I like?

Making Up for Past Mistakes

To start, I forgot to add something to the photo in a previous Thing, so to satisfy my need to complete what I started, I had to create a way to make that up. It’s less than ideal (which would be to do it right the first time), but I’m accepting the facts and doing what I can to make it work. This has little effect on my sleep, but I do think about it often enough while I’m awake.

Inbox Zero

As I strong advocate for GTD, I try to write actionable thoughts down as soon as I have them so I can free up my memory for other, potentially more important thoughts. There’s more achieving a free-mind than writing things down, but it gets me more than half way there. Therefore, knowing I am on top of my life helps me sleep at night.

Taking Care of Myself

Instead of waiting longer for my recent (and still happening now) toothache to go away, and knowing how excruciating toothaches could get, I called my dentist the second day of the toothache and saw him the next day. Knowing it was just a minor issue that will go away in a few days helped me sleep at night. Ice packs and painkillers helped with the rest.

The Olympics is My Life Inspiration

In the year 2000, I was watching the closing ceremony of the Sydney Summer Olympics when the president of the IOC admired the spirit of the Australian people and said in a monotone voice, “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie.” to which the crowd instead responded in three simple but enthusiastic grunts, “Oy! Oy! Oy!”

I always go back to that moment whenever I think about how passionate a united group can be. This is what I want to see in the world.

The Olympics is one of the few times in life where the world peacefully gathers in one place, both physically and virtually, to celebrate the best of humanity (by having people in their best physical and mental shape show us how much more we humans can push our limits). It was such a powerful symbol to my fifteen-year-old self that I had remained optimistic to this day (and foreseeably for the rest of my life) about the future of human race.

Ever since then, I had become more fascinated by everything about the Olympics: the human stories, the history of past Games, the bidding process, the mascots, the opening and closing ceremony, the lighting of the cauldron, etc. As someone interested in graphic design, I absorbed as much content as possible related to the visuals: the logo and branding, the medals and their traditions (the medals from every Summer Games are the same on one side, whereas the Winter Games medals are more open to different designs), the pictograms, and the torch and cauldron designs.

The Sydney Olympics was the first time I was opened to the world. In school, my social studies teacher created a special unit on Australia to go with the Olympics. And the TV coverage painted a very beautiful and inspirational picture of Sydney and Australia, with the iconic images of the Opera House with the Harbor Bridge, the Outback and Uluru, with the aboriginal people and the sounds of the didgeridoo, and the native animals of the kangaroo and the koala. At fifteen, I had come to believe this is what the real world feels like and that it is waiting for me to join it.

Finally, four years and a week ago, after ten years of making that wish, I finally got to visit Australia. I even got to count down and watch the fireworks off the Harbor Bridge and in Sydney Harbor on New Year’s Eve. A panoramic photo of my view that day still hangs above my bed. In terms of the Olympic park and stadium, I missed my chance to visit them, but it will definitely be on my itinerary next time I’m in Australia.

In my recent travels, though, I visited the Olympic parks and stadiums of the two most recent Summer Games (Beijing and London). I also checked out the site of the current (and future) Olympic stadium in Tokyo. I hope I can return in five and a half years and attend my first opening ceremony. I would also like to volunteer at a Summer Games someday and be a part of history. Depending on the host city, maybe 2024 will be the year.